Ratings agencies helped spark the financial meltdown of 2008-9, when they deemed that steaming piles of mortgage junk were brimming with triple-A goodness. They were wrong – and epically so.

Now S&P downgrades the debt of the entire country, further threatens to do so another notch, teams with fellow ratings agencies to bring Europe to its knees with each new appraisal and gets an assist for wiping trillions in wealth from investors’ portfolios in just a few days.